New Technologies in Art: the Rebirth of the “Art of Memory” Manthos Santorinaios (msantori@otenet.gr ) Georgia Panagopoulou (gpanagop@otenet.gr ) Christos Georgiadis (chrgeorg@mail.ntua.gr ) Athens School of Fine Arts, Hypermedia-Multimedia Laboratory Nefeli Dimitriadi (nefeli@wanadoo.fr ) University Paris 8, Department of Art and Technology of the Image Abstract: this paper deals with the artistic exploitation of the modern memory, i.e. the databases as well as web technologies, for the production of an innovative artwork with many different facets. We present our perspective regarding the role of new technologies in the artistic expression and we outline different ways, in which art can be combined with new technological advances. Finally, we present our approach towards the expansion of an existing project running in the Athens School of Fine Arts for a language-independent website (http://www.withoutwords-project.asfa.gr ) using elements from the scientific domains of semantic web, digital libraries and content management for the creation of a flexible, net art project. Modern technologies are exploited in an artistic project, which has as a target to assist human expression and communication overcoming the barriers set by natural languages. Introduction - From Renaissance “Art of Memory” to the 21 st century “Art of Databases” During the recent years, it is obvious that there is a continuous and direct interrelation between images, databases and the artistic projects, even the simpler ones. The same phenomenon is encountered also during the different evolution stages of the Internet. When WWW first appeared, graphic artists considered that a new opportunity was presented for them. However, they soon realised that the impressive graphics created with the new tools were not usable in the Internet world, due to their big size and the long time needed to be uploaded on any website. As different image compression techniques were developed, along with various Internet-based animation technologies, artists and audiovisual experts considered that this was actually the time that they finally conquer the domain. During that period, numerous techniques of cinematography and animation were applied on the Internet. However, it was finally proven that none of these estimations was absolutely correct: the key innovation presented by this new, hybrid platform lied in the productive combination of graphical arts with databases. What finally characterises the WWW is not the sophisticated image processing, nor the impressive 3D animation graphics, but rather, the combination of what exists on a web page with the content of supporting databases. Almost half a century since the first presentation of the theories of Vanevar Bush, who conceived the idea of hyperlink when describing the imaginary machine memex in his landmark article “As we may think” at 1945, and of Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext and worked on the famous “Xanadu” project, which was meant to be a global hypertext system of interconnected databases forming a huge virtual library, the web technologies, which are a combination of graphic arts, animation, IT programming and databases, finally achieve the practical realisation of these theories and dispose them to general public. Nowadays, a website can only be considered “important, if it incorporates underlying databases. Likewise, we cannot consider an artistic project as interactive artwork,